If you think a sunseeker is someone who likes lounging on Caribbean or Mediterranean beaches, meet Joern Dybdahl.
In the southern summer, the 46-year old Norwegian works in Antarctica as a technician at a research station. The rest of the year he is on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen - so he almost always lives in the land of the midnight sun.
"It's a special life - it's not for everyone," said the tanned trained welder of his extreme sunseeker lifestyle in two workplaces 17 000km apart.
"It's because I'm scared of the dark," he joked.
Dybdahl is in his fourth summer at the Troll research station, 250km inland, amid jagged mountains that remind Norwegians of the homes of the troll giants of fables.
In Svalbard, he works at a horse-riding centre. Several colleagues share his Arctic-Antarctic double-life - only eight of them stay at Troll through the Antarctic winter.
I met him on a 36-hour visit where I, by contrast, found even "summer" harsh enough - especially since I had to sleep in a tent in bone-chilling temperatures of about minus 15°C.
Our whole party of 40 officials, scientists and reporters - including Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg - spent the night in the white tents, so there was no way out for me.
Luckily the compact blue sleeping bag supplied expanded to a luxurious thickness when unpacked. It kept out the chill - but I had to put a sweater over my head to stop my face from freezing. After scant sleep, it was a relief to get back into the main heated building at Troll for a few cups of coffee.
Bird bath
Stoltenberg was visiting to learn about climate change and Antarctica, a vast block of ice which holds more than half the planet's fresh water. If it ever melted, it would raise world sea levels by almost 60 metres.
"Antarctica is the secret to understanding climate change," Stoltenberg told me during a chat in the warmth of the Troll station. My night in the tent had given me no sense of a thaw around Troll.
But later that day, with ice as far as the eye could see on a trip over a barren ice sheet, it was a surprise to see birds - a dozen or so south polar skuas - taking a bath in a puddle of water in bright sunshine.
Was this a shock sign of global warming?
"It's surprising, but pools form naturally even in freezing weather. It has nothing to do with climate change," Kim Holmen, research director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said as we shared a sledge towed by a caterpillar-tracked vehicle.
Dark rocks and sand at the surface can soak up enough of the faint Antarctic sun - shining round the clock in summer - to melt snow and ice even 1 100 metres above sea level.
Such pools scientists can explain. But they are struggling to answer the bigger question that is drawing ever more glaciologists to Antarctica: will global warming, widely blamed on human burning of fossil fuels, melt Antarctica's ice?
Even a slight net melt could threaten coasts from Florida to Bangladesh and drown low-lying Pacific islands.
'The size of a man's head'
One theory says global warming will heat the southern ocean, melt sea ice around Antarctica and let glaciers slip faster into the sea. Another says less chill air would absorb more moisture and might mean more snowfall, which would offset any losses.
The size of the Antarctic landscape was overwhelming - no trees, buildings or roads to give a sense of scale in an area 1,5 times as large as the United States.
As we travelled across the ice sheet, one cliff that looked modest from a distance turned out to be a sheer 700 metre precipice - more than twice the height of the Eiffel Tower.
I learned we had been lucky with the weather. Last November, staff were mystified to find a 40 ft metal shipping container had vanished after a storm.
"A few days later we found it. It had been blown four km, up and over a glacier," said Atle Markussen, head of the Troll station. "During that storm the wind picked up rocks the size of a man's head."